Rewriting apartheid South Africa: race and space in Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo’s novels*

This article employs oppositional black geography as a lens to examine spatiality in the novels of two black South African women writing during apartheid, Miriam Tlali and Lauretta Ngcobo. In analyzing Tlali’s Muriel at Metropolitan and Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die, it argues that the authors used a critical spatial analysis of the nation to critique apartheid and its oppressive policies. It holds that by insisting on authoring their own worlds in a country that sought to deny them creative agency, Tlali and Ngcobo carved out intellectual space that enabled them to critique dominant ideologies of Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy, while imagining and writing alternatives to a nation to which their relationships were primarily ones of disavowal and subjugation. Both Tlali and Ngcobo render visible the fissures within the seemingly naturalized apartheid sites they construct in their fiction, revealing the inherent contradictions and injustices of apartheid spatiality. Through their fiction, they were thus engaged in situated knowledge production and a reconfiguration of apartheid space into a more socially just place. In narrating subaltern discourses in their novels from the standpoint of those most oppressed by apartheid law and ideology and by creatively engaging the spatiality of apartheid, Tlali and Ngcobo offer new modes for reading the nation, valuable for elucidating the ways in which the national space genders black women, and how black women, in turn shape and reshape that space.     

South Korea’s North Korean Image Problem: Human Rights under the Spotlight

ABSTRACT

The 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea (UN COI) had a decisive impact on South Korea’s approach to North Korea’s human rights abuses in the several years following its release. This article interprets moves within South Korea to support the UN COI’s recommendations as taken in the interests of ontological security, or a stable sense of identity, which has also driven the state’s broader initiatives on image management and nation branding. It extends the boundaries of nation-branding research by considering why and how a state may adopt policies that enhance its moral visibility and reputation in world affairs. It considers how a positive reputation is enhanced by demonstrating good international citizenship, promoting the visibility of state identity parameters beyond its culture and core industries. This article interprets the South Korean government’s efforts to act on North Korean human rights following the UN COI, as well as the significance of being seen to be doing so at home and abroad as security-giving behaviour asserting its moral authority in relation to North Korea. It explores how a longstanding policy of relative silence on North Korea’s human rights record acceded to identity-driven pressures arising from the UN COI and influencing South Korea’s international image-management strategy between 2014 and 2017.     

全球化中的中华移民与华侨华人研究

论文从移民的背景、动机与动向等方面比较了近代与当代新老中华移民的异同;阐述了全球化背景中的中华移民在加拿大、美国、新西兰、澳洲与新加坡等"移民国家"与东南亚"原住民国家"的不同情况及其对于这些国家的影响和对当地华社的冲击;探讨了新移民研究的现状及其对当代华侨华人研究的启示。     

The dissolution of ancient Kvenland and the transformation of the Kvens as an ethnic group of people. On changing ethnic categorizations in communicative and collective memories

ABSTRACT

The aim is to trace how the ethnonym Kven and the interrelated imagination of Kvenland changed over time in Nordic political discourse from the Viking Age to the mid-eighteenth century. In the negotiations over fixed borders between Sweden, Denmark and Russia, recognition of ethnic groups played an important political role in legitimating the territorial claims of the states. It brought the history of ethnic groups to the table and in the process made visible ethnonyms and names for provinces used previously. The continuity of the ethnonyms is investigated as a chronological chain of communicative and collective memory. The ethnonym and the territory of Kvenland were used by the Norwegians to maintain an ethnic boundary with the Finnish speakers in the upper Bothnian area. The names Kven and Kvenland were never used in Sweden. The investigation shows that the Kvens constituted a group of Finnish speaking people existing in continuity from the Viking Age. Their core territory was situated in the upper Gulf of Bothnia area. When this was integrated into the Swedish kingdom the inhabitants were designated Finns by the Swedes. The Finnish speakers in Tornedalen, thus, kept their linguistic and cultural continuity but lost their western Scandinavian ethnonym Kven.     

Re-presentar the religious: nation,community and identity in museums 1

This paper examines the roles that museums play as ‘unofficially sacred’ places, underscoring or challenging the religious life of a people and ‘nation’. It focuses on three key questions: (1) Do sub-national and transnational religious formations pose a challenge to or present opportunities for nation-building strategies, and what part do museums play in this struggle? (2) In what ways do re-presentations of religion in museums contest or reinforce religious community and identity? and (3) What challenges do museum displays pose to the understanding of religious meanings? This paper explores these three key questions about the intersection of religion with politics and ideologies, social relations, and cultural interpretations and transformations using an in-depth case study of an exhibition on the Jewish community in Singapore.     

Madagascar's independence jubilee: a nation's holiday in times of crisis

The fiftieth anniversary of Madagascar's independence in 2010 took place in the midst of political crisis. The transitory government staged large public parties to mark the Jubilee. Despite a public discussion about legitimacy and justification of this fact, the national holiday was lavishly celebrated. In Madagascar, Independence Day is also an important family event and emphasis was put on private celebrations including family feasts and reunions. As a result, it enhanced the participants' emotional attachment to their personal and local face‐to‐face milieu. This article asks how the golden jubilee was celebrated against a backdrop of political illegitimacy. I contrast official state‐led initiatives and individual agency in the private sphere and discuss how the national holiday has been appropriated and reinterpreted by the population as a family and community holiday. This article is based on qualitative ethnographical fieldwork in Antananarivo before, during and after the peak of the independence jubilee.     

Democracy and the rights of women in the thinking of Giuseppe Mazzini

Addressing Italian workers in his Doveri dell’uomo of 1860, Mazzini unequivocally laid out his thoughts on women's rights. The thinker from Genoa, all the more after his encounters with other political philosophers from different national environments such as Britain and France, saw the principle of equality between men and women as fundamental to his project of constructing first the nation, and second a democratic republic. In his ideas regarding emancipation Mazzini, who spent a good 40 years of his life in exile, was one of a small group of European thinkers who in challenging the established customs and prevailing laws not only hoped for the end of women's social and judicial subordination, but also held that changes to the position of women were essential to the realisation of their political projects. Thanks to this respected group of intellectuals, the issue of female emancipation found a place in the nineteenth-century European debate regarding democracy and the formation of national states. The closeness of the positions of these thinkers, and their commitment in practice as well as theory, mean that it can legitimately be argued that in the course of the nineteenth century a current of feminist thinking took shape. This was born of the encounters between and reflections of various intellectuals who met first in France and then in England, and who came to see women's rights not just as a discrete issue for resolution but as fundamental to their projects for the regeneration of nations, or, as in the Italian case, for the construction and rebirth of a nation.     

鲁迅的民族思想与历史观

介绍鲁迅的历史观和民族思想.鲁迅的历史观有三个要点,一个诉求.即:人的、进化的、改革的历史观,和一个要解除主奴关系诉求.同时提出了“一切都是中间路”的重要观点.另外鲁迅的民族思想有对外,对内两大部分.对外他反对外国列强民族侵略中国,也批判中国强大以后去侵略别人.对内他从原来接受中国传统华夷之辨的思想,到辛亥革命以后改变为赞成各个民族平等、独立、和睦相处,共同发展的思想.     

NATIONALIZING HISTORY AND THE CHALLENGE OF DISCORDANT TEMPORALITIES1

Christopher Hill's National History and the World of Nations reminds us of the conjunctural moment of an emerging world market in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the promise it offered for vitalizing a “world history” yet to be written. More importantly, it supplies the silhouette of a radically different interpretive approach, formed by the force of a centrifugal perspective that—through its concentration on how France, the United States, and Japan were simultaneously motivated to construct representations of self‐identity in national narratives—converged to disclose the possibility of a wider world no longer held hostage to the geopolitical category of the “West.” Hill's account shows that the impulse behind the formation of national history employed different strategies to imagine a singular linear historical narrative of national identity that aimed both to remove the spectacle of coexisting, different, multiple temporalities and to weld large and regionally disparate populations into a single people who, in a new time, would be instructed to recognize themselves in the nation's story. In Hill's reckoning, national history in France, the United States, and Japan appears simply as another name for historical necessity that sought, through processes of naturalization and nationalization, to overcome the unstable and uneven relationship between state and capital but that failed to conceal the deeper reality of determinations demanded by the relations of capital at the local and international levels.